The university plans to hire consultants to design a network upgrade that will relieve the woes of an unreliable, slow server. However, plans on how to pay for the suggested upgrades are still sketchy.

Jeff Cooley, vice president for business affairs, said he expects the upgrades to cost $6 million and the consultants to cost $300,000. The university is taking bids and reviewing proposals, and hopes to choose a consultant firm by the end of the month.

Consultants will be paid out of deferred maintenance funds, which have been adding up since the university has not done extensive upgrades to the server yet.

Finding funding for the upgrades, though, may prove more challenging.

Cooley said he hoped the Illinois Board of Higher Education would allot $6 million to cover upgrade costs this year, but Eastern’s request was denied. However, with the current state of the Illinois budget and the economy, getting funding will be difficult. He said he will put in requests to the IBHE for fiscal year 2004 and is in the process of filling out a request for 2005.

“I’m really not too hopeful on that and that’s why we need to be looking at alternatives,” Cooley said.

One of those other options, Cooley said, is financing university bonds.

“That may be our best option at the time,” he said, though he would prefer to receive IBHE funding so the university would not have to sell bonds.

Information Technology Services officials have a good idea of what is causing the server to crash often and perform slowly. Cooley said the age of the server, coupled with a lack of maintenance over the years has caused the poor performance. For example, he said, the university uses category one cabling throughout campus; the cabling is first-generation technology and technology has already advanced to category six cabling.

However, even though examples of the aged server are obvious, Cooley said it is harder to pinpoint what elements of the system need attention immediately and what parts need certain upgrades.

Cooley said ITS does not have the expertise or the manpower to find these answers, and consultants are the first step in getting the problems addressed.

“It’s critical to the entire upgrade project that they do that design work for us,” he said.